Newcomer From ALi: Currently 7 Chipsets For P4

Having introduced the Aladdin-P4 chipset, the Taiwanese company ALi is the latest to join the ranks of chip manufacturers offering a chipset for the Intel Pentium 4. Up until ALi joined the pack, there had been six different chipsets for the Intel Pentium 4.

As in the past, ALi is banking on its extremely low chipset prices to help it gobble up a large market share - this is the only viable strategy, considering the manufacturer's current position in the market. Its new chipset boasts two new essential features that set it apart from the competition: Ultra-DMA/133 for the latest hard drives and DDR333 for high-speed RAM modules. The latter feature especially has figured very prominently in much of ALi's marketing material. However, the rather imposing name, "DDR333," only designates a memory clock that has been jacked up to 166 MHz - currently, SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM modules are specified to run at a maximum of 133 MHz. The official goal of "DDR333" (PC2700) solely consists of performing at least as well as a system with expensive Rambus modules and an Intel 850 chipset.